People often underestimate the cost of developing a Web site. There are so many different kinds of expenses that it is easy to overlook some.

The county and municipal representatives who participated in the study identified the following costs: hardware and software, staff time for technical work and content creation and management, overtime pay, contracts with ISPs, and the often intangible costs of competing job priorities for staff. Most of these governments figured out how to develop their sites within existing budgets and using current staff. For them, their sites quickly became regular costs of doing government business.